My dad took a sabbatical when I was 12, which meant we packed up the K Car and all of us — dad and mom and me and younger sis and cat Euphrates — moved to Virginia. He worked at UVa and the rest of us tried to adjust to life in Charlottesville. It was the first time I’d been to a new school, been to a new town, had to walk into a room full of strangers and be the new girl. Plus there was that 12 thing. No doubt the year could have been worse, but I can’t quite imagine how.
Because we were so far from our big extended family in New England, my parents decided we’d spend Thanksgiving, the four of us (sorry, Euphrates) at Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. They served us an “authentic” colonial Thanksgiving feast at a restaurant with low ceilings and wide plank floors. We were guided past diners in a big room… up a flight of stairs… squeezed through tables in smaller rooms… around a corner… to what seemed to be a closet space, way in the back, barely big enough for the four of us. We sat down nervously, realizing that we’d been separated from the rest of the holiday diners. Somebody made a joke about how they’d hidden us away. Then someone else made one. It got funny, and a rare stretch of family hilarity ensued, a giddy tumbling of laughter, all at our own expense. I guess it says something about our family that none of us thought that private room was a place of privilege.
That story says little except that Williamsburg was a kind of surreal place, one that turned us into slightly different people there that evening, our plates full of 20th century food masquerading as something more historic.
And it is surreal to see 20th century people gussied up in olde-timey clothes, inhabiting their colonial characters more fully than anybody in a big mouse suit. As I remember it, we walked the Jamestown ruins, a bunch of abandoned foundations overgrown by grass. I wanted more, but the real action was watching the jolly staff smithing horseshoes, carving musical instruments, blowing glass and touring us around.
All of which was, of course, complete bullshit.
One of the things I love about Matthew Sharpe’s book is that it creates a futuristic, dystopic Jamestown that gets much closer to the real thing than these poncy historical reenactments. Sharpe’s settlers are filthy — both with dirt and with violent sexuality — racked by illness, starving, desperate, unwashed. (Archeological finds at Jamestown include a silver ear picker, signs of attempted trepanation, and a Spatula mundani, which treated severe constipation by withdrawing “hard excrements” with its loopy end.) Despite all the brutality — or maybe in connection with it — the book is also tremendously funny, and sweet, and, in Pocahontas’ hands, enthralling. Maybe if I hadn’t witnessed the quaint music and darling craftspeople of Williamsburg, I might not have snickered quite so much at the brutal world faced by Sharpe’s characters. But that corner of Virginia has always made me laugh.
There are so many good things about Jamestown that Matt Cheney put together a brilliant catalog of links to reviews and interviews and whatnot. And today the LBC posts its podcast interview with author Matthew Sharpe. Don’t miss it.
